House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is struggling to get several pieces of must-pass legislation through his chamber. In other words, it is a day ending in “y” on Capitol Hill under the ever dysfunctional, deeply unpopular GOP majority. What is remarkable about the straits in which Johnson finds himself this week, though, is not the fact that he is once again being buffeted by his caucus while up against the clock, but how routine it has become.
Since becoming speaker, Johnson has become known for pulling last-minute wins that don’t exactly excite his team but at least are sufficient to forestall disaster. But beneath the shifting chaos engulfing the GOP’s slim majority this week is a much deeper problem: The House is stuck in neutral with no clear next step. And this time, even the pressure that normally produces results may not be enough to kick the legislature into gear.
Most of Tuesday in the House was spent with GOP leaders wrangling over how to bring as many priorities to the floor as possible before (another) scheduled recess begins Friday. Earlier in the day on Tuesday, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., warned reporters that it would be a late night of voting. By early evening, though, that promise had collapsed as Johnson informed members that any planned votes were canceled.
The speaker made that call as the House Rules Committee was still in session, desperately attempting to hammer out a “special rule” that could move three major pieces of legislation forward simultaneously. As of Tuesday evening, when the committee finally managed to pass its rule, it seemed as though it would likely fail on the House floor. It was only after holding the vote open for more than two hours Wednesday, with seven Republicans at one point in opposition, that the rule finally passed.
It used to be that a rule failing to pass would be a major crisis for House leadership, because they usually pass with only the majority’s votes. Failing to get through the first step of fast-tracking a bill to the floor would be seen as an ominous sign for a speaker’s grip on their caucus. But as House Republicans in the past four years have only held on to the majority by a handful of votes, it has become an ordinary, if frustrating, occurrence that a rule fails. Johnson managed to avoid that fate this time, but to have struggled this hard to get past the first step in getting these bills finalized doesn’t bode well for their future.
On top of that, there’s a time crunch spurring the House to act. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on foreign nationals abroad without individual warrants, will expire on Thursday. The White House warned Tuesday that the funds that President Donald Trump ordered shuffled around to pay Department of Homeland Security staffers will run out as of Friday.
The annual farm bill, which was meant to be the least worrisome legislation on the docket, is running into issues of its own despite being a necessity. Originally part of the rules package debated Wednesday, the trade-off for dodging defeat was reportedly sending that bill back to the Rules Committee for more consideration — but that still leaves the bigger hurdles before the House unresolved.
The FISA bill alone would be a major headache, given the demands for reforms from Democrats and Republicans alike to prevent domestic spying on U.S. nationals. Johnson has refused to budge on that front but has toyed with including an entirely different item from the conservatives’ wish list: a ban on central bank digital currencies. But tacking that unrelated provision onto the FISA bill might doom it in the Senate, which will need unanimous approval to get it to the president’s desk in time.
Meanwhile, the DHS shutdown has lasted for months despite Johnson having a Senate-passed bill sitting on his desk for weeks now that would reopen a majority of the department. Punchbowl News reported that Johnson is now “trying to rework language in the Senate version that zeroed out accounts for ICE and Border Patrol” to make it more palatable to his most conservative members. Any major changes would mean the bill needs to go back to the Senate, where it could once again run into a Democratic blockade. The Senate budget resolution that would kick-start the process to separately fund immigration enforcement is likewise getting a side-eye from House members who are skeptical of its narrow focus.
Johnson is trapped in a place where he can’t move the funding bill without first clearing the budget resolution, but also can’t move the budget resolution without sign-off from his members on what’s going into the reconciliation bill. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has been growing more frustrated with Johnson’s refusal to even bring up the DHS funding bill for a vote. As I have previously said, it is a weird world we are living in where the Senate — the United States Senate! — is growing impatient with how long the House is taking to act.
It’s odd to think that the high point of Congress’ Tuesday was when the House paused in its drama to welcome King Charles III to address the legislators. The reality that Johnson faces is that any step he takes to pass one of the items on his plate threatens to upend everything else. The result is a weird bit of frantic potential energy with no outlet, and with the president, usually the go-to to help drag the House GOP into line, nowhere to be found. It’s tough to tell what might finally end the House’s inertia, but until this, to paraphrase Isaac Newton, a legislature at rest will stay at rest without intervention from an outside force.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.